Then there came a brief excursion which may have illustrated his doubts about a career. He left off teaching and went to Toronto. There, with the assistance of Goldwin Smith, he established _The Week_, the most important of the Canadian literary periodicals. He relinquished this work the following year to take the chair of English and French literature in King's College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1887 he abandoned the French department for the department of Economics and International Law. At Windsor he lived in a house in the balmy woods--"Kingscroft," he called it--and there he planned three books--"The Forge in the Forest," his first Acadian romance; "The Book of the Native," and "A History of Canada." These plans compelled the abandonment of teaching, so, in 1895, Roberts left King's College and returned to Fredericton. At the age of thirty-five, therefore, he formally adopted the profession of literature. Early in 1897 he moved to New York, where for eight months he was associate editor of _The Illustrated American_. Since then he has directed his efforts wholly to authorship. And with the utmost justification. In narrative and in descriptive power he shines brilliantly among his contemporaries. Hovey would not answer the question: "Who is the greatest poet born on Canadian soil?"--"but," he writes, "when I say that Roberts is _par excellence_ the 'Poet of Canada,' I have little fear that anyone will contradict me." There is his noble hymn, "Canada," there is "Autochthon," there is "Kinship," there is "Origins"--poems of faultless grace and deep-founded sentiment and what one critic has termed "chiselled, Parnassian calm." For example: The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane. Space, in the dim predestined hour, Shall crumble like a ruined tower. I only, with unfaltering eye, Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by. Hovey, whom we may accept as an accomplished judge of symbolist literature, put "Do Seek their Meat from God" and "The Young Ravens that call upon Him," two sketches in "Earth's Enigmas," and "Savory Meats," a story published in the _Chap-Book_, together, and said that they "form an altogether unique and extraordinary triptych. I am inclined to think these three pieces," he says, "Roberts's most notable contribution to literature. The problem of the struggle for existence, of the preying of life on life, is treated with an inexorable fidelity to the fact, a catholic sympathy, a sense of universality and mystery, and a calm acceptance, that reaches the level of 'pathos' in the highest Greek usage of the word. There is a finality in these three prose poems that is known only to the greatest art."